In separate appearances Wednesday evening, both Cain and his campaign manager, Mark Block, asserted that the Perry campaign was behind POLITICO’s report Sunday that, as head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, at least two female employees complained about inappropriate behavior by Cain and ultimately signed confidential agreements that gave them financial payouts to leave the association.

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“We’ve been able to trace it back to the Perry campaign that stirred this up in order to discredit me,” Cain said at a tele-town hall held by TheTeaParty.net. “The fingerprints of the Rick Perry campaign are all over this, based on our sources.”

Block delivered similarly pointed criticism to Fox News’s Bret Baier. “The actions of the Perry campaign are despicable,” he said. “Rick Perry and his campaign owe Herman Cain and his family an apology.”

Cain and Block also attacked POLITICO for printing the story. The GOP presidential candidate said POLITICO had no documentation and made “anonymous accusations.”

Block’s claims came after Cain said in a Forbes online piece Wednesday that he had told strategist Curt Anderson, who’s now working for the Perry campaign, about one incident of a settlement involving a female employee while he was running for U.S. Senate from Georgia in 2003.

As his evidence, Block noted that Anderson was hired by the Perry campaign roughly two weeks ago.

“What else happened two weeks ago?” asked Block, who mostly read from a prepared statement as he sat in the seat. “POLITICO began this smear campaign.”

“It’s an outrage and as I said before, Rick Perry needs to apologize to Herman Cain and, quite frankly, to America,” he said.

Perry’s campaign and Anderson have both flatly denied the assertions.

Ray Sullivan, Perry’s spokesman, forwarded a previously released statement from Anderson saying he had nothing to do with the story. And he added that Block’s claim was totally untrue.

“No one at our campaign was involved in this story in any way,” Sullivan said. “Any claim to the contrary is patently false. The first we learned of it was when we read the story in POLITICO.”